You’re still getting an F. Kant would have seen this.

Since it’s midterm time, you might find yourself on the business end of a request to improve a grade because “it’s really important that I get an A!” (I got one of these a little while ago: “I need to do well in your class because I’m not doing well in orgo!” My reply– why don’t you solve that problem by doing better in orgo?– was deemed unhelpful.) And you might be tempted to respond: that’s stupid, go away. Here’s how you can say something even better, namely, “I’d love to help you out, but the very nature of rational agency forbids it.” Or, here’s why Kant would tell you not to raise the grade.

Cartoon version of Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: Kant thinks that morality rests on a single command, the categorical imperative.* Kant’s first (“universal law”) formulation of the categorical imperative is this:

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. (Groundwork 421)

The idea, basically: the maxim of your act (the rule or principle behind it, roughly) has to be such that

(a) it can be made into a universal law without contradiction; and
(b) you can will that it is a universal law without contradiction.

If your maxim can be universalized, then the act is all right; if not, it isn’t.

Kant follows this up with four examples where people in the midst of some ethical quandary (kill myself? make a lying promise? develop my talents? help others?) stop long enough to wonder what a good Kantian would do. (Answers: no on the first two, sometimes on the latter pair.) The most famous of these is the lying promise case. Suppose I need money, but the only way to get it is to promise (falsely) that I’ll pay you back. The maxim of my action is something like this: for my own benefit, I’ll make a lying promise. But when that maxim is made into a universal law, there’s a problem. If everyone tried to make lying promises, there could be no promises. (In other words, the law is contradictory because it commands promises while making promises impossible.)

What’s neat about the case is the way that widespread violation of a social practice destroys the practice. It’s a nice way of illustrating the unfairness of the wrong action: your benefit from the lie is possible only if other people are willing to do the hard work of keeping promises while letting you skate by as a kind of free-rider. What’s unfortunate about the case is that it’s one of the few examples where the Universal Law formulation works so cleanly.

Luckily, the “change my grade for the wrong reasons” case is similar. A grade is what it is because it’s tied to the quality of a student’s work. If it were assigned, universally, on the basis of something else, it wouldn’t be a grade anymore (or, if you like, it wouldn’t be used for, say, med school admissions). So the maxim “I’ll assign grades based on how large a bribe you slipped me” cannot be a universal law because, once universalized, it destroys the social practice of grading. Grades lose their meaning, just as “I promise” loses its meaning in a world where lying promises are mandated by universal law.

The problem with the “I need a higher grade” student is that he’s asking to be an exception. He wants the rules linking grades to quality to govern everyone else’s grades, while his own are governed by his self-interest. So he’s asking you to act in one way in his case and another way in everyone else’s. Or, if you want it in more grandiose terms, he’s asking you to act on reasons that cannot serve as reasons in relevantly similar situations, namely, other students requesting grades for their benefit.

In the background, there’s an idea that what it is to act for reasons involves acting on universal, if highly specific, principles. Thus the idea of acting for reasons that can’t be taken as reasons by other agents in relevantly similar circumstances is a big problem.

“…and that’s why I can’t change your grade. It’s not my choice– I’m just bound by the moral law in virtue of my rational agency!” Works every time.

*an imperative (or command) is categorical when it gives reason for action that are independent of any desire or inclination the agent has– it applies to all rational beings as such.

This is officially an award-winning blog

HNN, Best group blog: "Witty and insightful, the Edge of the American West puts the group in group blog, with frequent contributions from an irreverent band.... Always entertaining, often enlightening, the blog features snazzy visuals—graphs, photos, videos—and zippy writing...."

Being a chick, my response to this “I need a higher grade!” thing was always to reassure the student that I liked them *personally*, but that the grade was a measure of the work *for this class at this time*, rather than a measure of their intelligence or worth, blah fucking blah blah.

From the student’s point of view you have the ability to restore balance and justice to a world that has been disrupted by a malign force, e.g. orgo.

Additionally, as an undergrad that I was always of the view that my learning in classes far exceeded professors’ feeble metrics. Unless they’ve really imbibed Kant, they don’t think their case *is* generalizable.

The best response to you for the student has to be what Sydney Morgenbesser is reported to have said to a policeman who told him that he couldn’t let him smoke inside a metro station because if he did he’d have to let everyone do it. His retort: ‘Who do you think you are, Kant?’ Morgenbesser spent the night at the police station.

I love this argument, too. “I’m really glad to hear it, because that’s the point of learning. Your grade still depends on your performance on these paltry exams/essays, but I completely agree with you that they are an incomplete measure of real learning. Grading is a compromise based on the reality of what professors can measure in a way that is hopefully relatively fair across the board. . . .”

“…it destroys the social practice of grading. Grades lose their meaning…”

thanks, professor, i really do understand that. and i agree!
in fact, the destruction is already underway, independently of anything that you and i do!

but luckily the destruction is not immediate, and it is not total annihilation. instead, it’s just a slow, gradual slide into meaningless. there a gradual process of replacement, whereby last decade’s c-student becomes this decade’s b-student, and last decade’s b becomes this decade’s a.

and i’m just trying to get ahead of the destruction-curve a bit, that’s all. the threat of destruction does not undermine the rationality of my act, so long as i can keep one step of ahead of that curve.

if i can get that grade this month, then i can get that job on wall street this summer, and then apres moi le deluge, good buddy!

If the student isn’t more than half a grade into F territory, you could always offer them the sop of raising them half a grade if they can correctly tell you what Kant (or whoever they’ve been studying with you) would think of their special pleading. This can then be retroactively Kantified by offering all of the other students the same extra-credit opportunity next class session.

Of course if they don’t know the answer, and they almost certainly don’t, this will do nothing to stop their whining.

I am a pre-med student who enrolled in your philosophy course to fulfil a distribution requirement. I thought ethics would be important for me to know as a doctor, and I thought I was smart enough to do well in my core courses and in this course. I was wrong about that. Some students are smart and versatile enough to get A’s in orgo and in ethics. I’m not.

That doesn’t mean I won’t be a good doctor. My science and math grades are strong enough to get me into med school, just as long as I can keep up a reasonably high overall grade point average. But too many late nights in lab and too many weekends spent on problem sets made it impossible for me to do work above B-quality work for you. If I had had more time, I believe I could have earned an A. You have no way of knowing that, of course, and I don’t suppose it matters. I’m genuinely sorry about that.

If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t have taken your course. I would have taken one of the recognized gut classes that my buddies told me to take. I thought that wasn’t the honorable way to go. I thought college was about broadening one’s mind and trying new things. Well, I wasn’t cynical enough, or I was too confident of my own abilities. I made a mistake.

Now, without your knowing it, you have become the gatekeeper for my entry into med school. It’s not a role you want, and you may deny that you have it, but the fact is that my grade in this class has the potential to eliminate me from consideration for med school. That’s not rational of the med schools. It’s arbitrary and unfair for them to treat a B from you as showing less ability and effort than an A from one of those gut class professors, but that’s how they work.

I don’t deny your right to grade my work as a B – I merely point out that there is no fairness issue here. There is no uniform grading standard among professors, and it is routine for students’ comparable performance at this university and even in the same department to obtain very different grades. The grading system as a whole is unfair and arbitrary, and the professors as a group, who certainly know it, make no effort to reform it. Many professors don’t care, and others seem to believe that as long as they are consistent themselves, the unfairness of the overall system has nothing to do with them. That’s not an ethical stance, but it’s an easy stance, and I don’t blame the professors for thinking that by keeping their own skirts clean, they are acting ethically. But you, as an ethics professor, can certainly see the fallacy in that reasoning.

So the question for you is how to act most ethically in an unfair system, where true fairness is impossible. I contend that raising my grade to an A is the least unfair thing you can do.

If you raise my grade to an A, you will be giving me a grade equivalent to that earned by many students in courses not taught by you for the level of performance I achieved. Thus, there will be no unfairness to anyone outside the university who uses my transcript to evaluate me as compared to other students.

If you raise my grade to an A, there will be no harmful repercussions to you, or your other students, or to the university at large. I will not be competing with your serious students for entry into the philosophy department as a major, or for entry into graduate school. You will not be complicit in creating an incompetent philosopher. Because the university does not publish statistics on grades by professor or department, the A you give me will not devalue the grades of any other student.

Given the unavoidable unfairness of the grading system as a whole, it is simply not possible for you to grade fairly. Fairness is outside your power, and whatever you do will have unfair effects. I therefore ask you to act in that unfair manner which minimizes the effect of unfairness on any identifiable individual. The least unfair thing you can do in these circumstances — the act that will do the most good and the least harm — would be to raise my grade to an A. I urge you to do so.

Oddly, I think that the changes in grade standards across the community create an obligation to change my own. (I don’t want to be the curmudgeon insisting that C should be the median grade.)

A serious response to Bloix 2.0 would involve the distinction between perfect and imperfect duties to others. A duty to aid, for example– the fourth of Kant’s four cases– is an imperfect duty to others, which means that you don’t have to aid everyone, but you can’t adopt a policy of never aiding anyone.

A serious response to Bloix 1.0 (from me in particular) would be something like this: true, there are differences in standards; that’s why my distributions are decided in light of institutional and department trends I calculate after pestering the registrar for grading data. It is a priori that I am a median grader. But there are broader issues about, say, the value of equal treatment in a system rife with unequal treatment.

This is what A. Student meant when s/he wrote that “some professors think that by keeping their own skirts clean, they are acting ethically.”

My point is that students are aware that they are treated unfairly; that they are unable to articulate this understanding to those with power over them; that occasionally the unfairness, which always rankles, actually has the potential to have extremely unfair life consequences for them; and that when they make their pathetic little efforts to protect themselves from these consequences, they are belittled.

Now, just because universities permit grotesquely arbitrary and unfair grading as a matter of course, doesn’t mean that there are students who shouldn’t go to med school. But professors who spend their lives at universities without lifting a finger to correct the unfairness of the grading system have no business belittling students who seek to alter their grades. If the system is unfair, no student has any obligation to refrain from seeking special treatment.

That doesn’t mean that I won’t do well as a doctor, but I bit off more than I could chew.

If I had known your class would be difficult, I would not have taken it.

You now have to take responsibility for my lack of judgment. In fact, it’s not even my fault that this is your responsibility. I blame the schools I am applying to.

Since I haven’t done the work required to earn an A, I am going to attempt to cast doubt on the validity of grading. Grades are subjective, so I propose that they are without any meaning. Therefore, you can give me an A even though by my own admission I haven’t earned it.

I will now pull a rabbit out of my hat and tell you that violating your own grading standards is the most ethical thing you can do.

We’ll start with a lowest-common-denominator appeal. I believe that my work would have earned an A in an easier course, so that is what you should give me. This is not unfair to people outside the university who might expect that a grade is in some way tied to actual academic performance.

Raising my grade will not hurt you (unless someone sees this letter, of course). This isn’t my major, so whether or not I actually learned anything in your class is not important. Also, the university will keep the evidence of your academic dishonesty a secret.

Again, I claim that grading is not legitimate. If you agree with that, you might as well give me whatever grade I ask for. I will close by employing a vaguely utilitarian argument to support my claim that you should act dishonestly in order to aid me.

I trust you appreciate the irony of a student in an ethics class trying to persuade the professor to assign a grade that the student hasn’t earned.

Bloix- do you think that med schools only look at the GPA and don’t look at the classes? Maybe that’s right- I’ve never been associated with a med school- but it’s not true of of most graduate programs or of most law schools- they care, at least on the margins, about the types of classes taken and have pretty good ideas as to which ones are easy A’s and which are not.

Beyond that, a problem with your scenario that the the professor would just have to take the student’s word for it. But why should she do that?

there would have been nothing unethical in schindler’s saving everyone. it was good that he saved some, it would have been better if he had save more, and there was no point at which his saving more would have ceased being better. he could be indiscriminate, and still be ethical.

but the point of grades is to discriminate. if neddy fails to do his job by discriminating better performance from worse performance, then he hands on a harder job to the med school admissions committees, whose job is also to discriminate. if they abdicate and accept everyone, then the med school has a harder job discriminating whom to graduate. if the med school fails to do its job and gives everyone md’s, then health care consumers have a much, much harder job to do discriminating qualified doctors from people who happen to have an md.

when trying to assure quality, discrimination is good.

once you sort out why the schindler comparison is profoundly inapposite, you may be able to figure out why it does not show neddy’s behavior is unethical.

Now, just because universities permit grotesquely arbitrary and unfair grading as a matter of course, doesn’t mean that there are students who shouldn’t go to med school.

I assume that the “are” should actually be “aren’t”, otherwise the opposition doesn’t make any sense, but what evidence do you have for the first half of that sentence? I’ll accept the evidence free assertion that some professors’ grading is capricious and arbitrary, but the assertion that this is a matter of course at most universities, both doesn’t jibe with my experience and requires some kind of evidence. If the whole system really is rotten at the core, then, sure, you’re justified in treating it as a pro forma exercise on the way to or in the way of some future professional whatsit. Also we would be morally obligated to burn the whole thing down and start over again. I’d be down with that (I’m not a big fan of grades to begin with and would prefer written evaluations and the complete elimination of gpa). But since I’m not convinced by your first premise and I do have to give grades, they really ought to mean something.

Like Matt, I don’t know if (all) med schools are really the gpa obsessed monsters they’re made out to be. If they are that’s incredibly stupid of them, but it’s still their job to assess the quality of their applicants, not mine. If you’re granting that not everyone who wants to go to whatever med school should have the right to go, then how should I as a grader help them to determine whether this particular applicant will be a good doctor, especially if I’m deliberately fudging my assessment of how said applicant did in my course? Presumably these hypothetical med schools resort to gpa hazing because they have too many applicants as it is, so anyone I push in pushes someone else out. You’re not asking me to level the playing field but to game the system for a particular individual.

Finally you got idiot snark from me, because the epistolary argument you constructed is extremely disrespectful to what teachers do. I go out of my way to explain to students what they need to do to get an A in my course. If they don’t want to do that, they can take another damn course. If they make a mistake, well mistakes have consequences. And for the love of god, you’d want a doctor to know that.

well, assuming that someone who makes Biox’s case that well actually needs to make that case, then isn’t the answer just that this is just the midterm point in the semester, that there are plenty of opportunities ahead to turn that B into an A? And, as the semester goes on, isn’t there the possibility of a kind of mutually informed but unspoken contract, like “If, you start and keep on doing better work, cross your Ts and dot your Is, participate more in class, stop treating my class like it’s less important than orgo since you’ve just told me that it is just as important, in practical if not in substantial terms, and if you do this, I will do whatever I ethically can to make sure that your work past this point carries the weight that it should, and in the areas where grading is subjective my judgements will be informed to some degree by the impressive case you’ve just made.”

Isn’t this what midterm grades are for? the midterm grades I’m turning in tomorrow represent about 1/3 of the graded content of the semester, a little less actually since I put a little more weight on class participation post midterm, so that if they get scared, start prepping better and start talking, it actually does them some good.
And practically speaking, there’s usually a workable correspondence between midterm grades and final grade expectations. Of he grades I jsut turned in, anyone carrying a B right now could turn that into an A, tho most won’t. Anyone carrying a D or F right now would be pretty thrilled to pull out a C+/B- by the end of the term.

If you fold on this, you are the second class citizen in that student’s academic agenda, and their effort and the attention won’t get any better. Said student will likely be a waste of your time the rest of the semester. If you don’t fold but still allow the possibility for actual work to bring the grade up, and it comes up, then everyone’s a winner. And, if you don’t fold and the work doesn’t come up, then I’m not sure I want that student putting an IV into my 80 year old grandmother after said student/future intern has been awake for 28 hours, thankyouverymuch.

Well, it doesn’t surprise me that people who earn their livings by participating in an arbitrary and unfair system are unable to recognize that the system is arbitrary and unfair. Note the anger in JPool – he simply denies that gut courses exist at his school.

And he keeps his skirts clean by explaining to his students what his courses require, so he doesn’t have to worry about his role as a cog in a larger unfair system.

In all other systems of evaluation known to human existence, regularized systems of quality control are absolutely essential to assure consistency in evaluation- but not in grading. If you want to assure consistency in the diameter of metal pins, you need quality control, but letter grades in higher education don’t require any such thing. Grading is magically fair and consistent because the people who do it have good intentions. And since universities don’t collect and publicize the data on grading, there’s no evidence that grading is unfair, so it must be fair. And anyway, there are no social science tools available in a university to study and evaluate this kind of data.

Of course, the reason that students “obsess” about grades – the only reason they care about them at all, and the only reason you are required to give them, JPool – is that graduate and professional schools require them. Your job is to be a feeder and a screen for such schools. It doesn’t matter that you don’t see yourself that way. Of course you are not a “fan” of grading. The grades you give are not necessary to you and they play no part in your self-serving misunderstanding of your own job. But the grades are essential to your students. Your students understand your importance to their future lives. And to the vast majority of them that importance, much as you deny it, is as a dispenser of grades. (The students who don’t have aspirations for post-graduate education really don’t much care, do they? They just don’t want to fail.)

It’s the universities’ obligation to make grading fair, and their failure to do so is a very serious moral failing. The students understand this, but they are unable to tell you about it, because you have power over them. This is why they appear to you to be cringing and infantile. Note Bitch PhD’s use of the word “babysitting.” You’d think a feminist would grasp how subjection to arbitrary power deforms character, but then I suppose professors- who get little benefit from the power they have, and are themselves relatively powerless in the larger world – really don’t understand the power of the grades they award over their students.

Note the final paragraph in Jpool’s comment: If “A. Student” wanted an A, s/he should have taken a gut. If s/he too stupid to understand that you have to be a cynic to succeed, s/he doesn’t deserve to be a doctor. This is not argument. It’s not even snark. It’s Jonah Goldberg-level self-justification.

Grading can be capricious and unfair. I try not to make mine that way. I am a foolish mortal, so I probably am capricious and unfair sometimes. all I can do is try to police this in myself. Making my grading even more capricious by allowing some students to convince me of their greater need than other students through an avenue that isn;t advertised on the syllabus and therefore isn’t equally available to everyone is not a way to make the system of grading more fair across classes.

The system of grading doesn’t necessarily produce learning and can often get in the way of it. I’d be happy to do without it, if you want to get me a job at Santa Cruz or wherever then I would be forever in your debt. No, I mean that. (Must. Not. Be. Snarky.) In fact, I’d love that job and one of the reasons is that i’m skeptical of the effects of grades. But I have convinced myself that I can teach effectively despite having to work within the grading system. I hope I’m right and it isn’t something that I take for granted. I spent a couple of decades between flunking out of college and going back and going to grad school. I try to use every bit of that experience in informing the way that I deal with the human beings whose work I have to evaluate. I am no starry eyed thrall of acedmic isntitutionality. I am not a good cog. I’m trying to do something that I think is at least a little bit important and do it with conscience, and your holier/indier than thou attitude towards this is fucking irritating.

Making an A in a class despite effort, produciton and attention isn’t an inalienable right. If someone wants to make a better grade than they are right then, and they take the time to come talk to me, I will help them to find a way to make their work better. If they can’t do that, they need to drop the class and take the gut class. if they don’t figure it out soon enough to do that, then I’ll work very hard to get them to learn the material, because that’s my job. If they don’t come talk to me until the end of the year, despite the repeated reminders that i’m available for just this kind of help, then there isn’t alot more that I can do. within the admittedly flawed system here, midterm grades allow me to encourage interventions with people who might otherwise prefer to not learn anything. Despite the unfairness of the system, some of this really is up to them.

“In all other systems of evaluation known to human existence, regularized systems of quality control are absolutely essential to assure consistency in evaluation- but not in grading.”

This is laughably false statement that leads me to suspect we’ve got some tongue-in-cheek trolling going on here. Counter-examples abound: Job performance reviews, the strike zone in baseball, hotornot.com, American Idol, ad damn-near-infinitum. The idea that grading is unusual, let alone unique, in this respect is ridiculous.

So, how do we cope with systems that are, by nature, subjective and to some degree arbitrary? Well, every umpire in baseball calls the strike zone a little differently. There’s just no way around it. They’re all different people with different perspectives. No matter how objective they try to be, they will never call exactly the same strike zone. Players will tell you that they can deal with the different strike zones so long at each umpire is consistent in his or her application of it. It’s an imperfect compromise, but from a practical standpoint, it works.

That isn’t “keeping one’s skirts clean,” that’s attempting to do the best you can and be as consistent as possible given the circumstances.

And, just because I can’t resist getting in on the snark, please compare Jpool’s comment:

“A. Student” wanted an A, s/he should have taken a gut. If s/he too stupid to understand that you have to be a cynic to succeed, s/he doesn’t deserve to be a doctor”

To the letter from Bloix:

“If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t have taken your course. I would have taken one of the recognized gut classes that my buddies told me to take. I thought that wasn’t the honorable way to go. I thought college was about broadening one’s mind and trying new things. Well, I wasn’t cynical enough, or I was too confident of my own abilities. I made a mistake.”

These are essentially the same proposition: If the desired outcome is to receive an A, then taking a gut class would have been smarter than taking a challenging course. I agree that one of the two exhibits an unhealthy amount of self-justification…

Bloix’s complaint isn’t with universities, professors, or grading practices. It’s with life. Comparable efforts receive radically different rewards every day and all the time, often quite tragically. Any passing student receives their degree, which makes them immensely privileged, by world and historical standards. But, it’s in the nature of privilege that it tends to dull the moral sensibilities, unless an effort is made to resist the dulling tendencies. And so we hear the refrain: “Unfair! Unfair!” Please. Stop. Just stop.

Karmadrome,
That wasn’t my comment, it was Bloix’s statement of what they decided I was saying (which, wasn’t what I was saying at all, but you know…).

Also, I’m remembering reading Bloix making this argument before (here?), about how As should be the default grade and Bs if they don’t do all the work and Cs if they really really screw up and anything else is just power tripping, but I can’t find it. Bloix, was that you?

You’d think someone with the hubris to lecture me about feminism might pause for half a second to contemplate the gendered connotations implicit in the word “babysitting”. Especially in light of my clearly distinguishing between the issue at hand–grading–and the emotional caretaking role I’m talking about havng taken in the past as a female professor.

Of course, that would require someone to take feminism seriously, which is seldm the case among arrogant young men who attempt to school feminists about feminism.

Sorry JPool-I assumed his quotation was a quotation. My mistake. That means Bloix was attributing to you a somewhat less self-important version of their own argument and then calling you self-important, right? That makes my head hurt.

thanks, alvis. i agree: i have generally found bloix more reasonable, on other topics, than i have found him on this topic today.

you know, we all have our good and bad days. we all have our pet peeves. as i said to somebody else a few weeks ago, sometimes threads just turn weird on you, and push everybody into an oppositional stance.

the hazards of blog commenting. the vagaries of blog commenting. there’s a thread on that over at ct right now.

Bloix: “In all other systems of evaluation known to human existence, regularized systems of quality control are absolutely essential to assure consistency in evaluation- but not in grading.”

KB: “if i can get that grade this month, then i can get that job on wall street this summer, and then apres moi le deluge, good buddy!”

No shit. Since, by Bloix’s reasoning, S&P, Moody’s and Fitch couldn’t have been grading collateralized debt obligations using “systems of evaluation known to human existence”, we can now infer who’s really to blame for the financial crisis: Klaatu. (Who, please note, has never been photographed together with Tim Geithner. Separated at birth? Or the same alien?)

We’re approaching giant squid territory here, people. (It’s also probably worthwhile to point out that the kid who is saying “I am doing badly in orgo so I need an A in your class” is likely not cringing.)

Imagine my chagrin when a whiz kid from Dayton made all A’s in the first quarter while I made two B’s and a C+ . My rather poor grades were somewhat mitigated by my having to hold three jobs in order to pay my living expenses. I was also absolutely certain that the C + resulted from whimsical grading by the teaching assistants in a course called Contemporary Civilization. As I think of it now I still become infuriated, and if there was anyone to listen to my case today, I would insist that my examinations be reevaluated and my grade raised accordingly!

The great underlying problem here is that the grades given in a university are actually used for something. This is insane. The admission into post-graduate education should not happen via theuse of GPA.

First of all, there is no need for medicine and law to be post-graduate fields of study. In most continental European countries, students are admitted to the medical and legal fields right after the high school. (Naturally, the law and med schools last much longer, as they cover the pre-school material also.) There, the same selection methods as in any other field may be used. (With all the unfairness of these methods involved.)

In the post-graduate education of other fields, I prefer a clear system of personal preference of the professors. It should be a free choice of the professors who they wish to take as their post-graduate students. After all, these students will be conducting research for them, so whatever selection method they use, the professors have the incentive of choosing the students they deem to have the best capability. So, instead of seemingly rational post-graduate admission procedures, I suggest institutionalized, open professorial despotism.

I would sometimes go to a professor to discuss the grading of tests and would explicitly say that I was not asking for him to change the grade, but just trying to make my opinion known or to make sure I knew wherein my error lay. While this had the advantage of being the truth, I was not unaware of the amount of similar conversations that these professors must have with students explicitly asking for grade changes, and I wondered whether my denials were believed to be some sort of head-fake.

I suggest a giant squid. Bringing us back to kid bitzer and the greatest web poem parody I have read. For this, kid gets an A. Always. Even if he is wrong. Even if it’s a chemistry class. Especially if it’s orgo.

Lurker’s right; if you want someone to be a doctor, train them to be a doctor. If you think that learning a bit of philosophy (or a foreign language, or whatever) is a good thing for a doctor, make that part of the course. But forcing would-be doctors to learn irrelevant stuff by design – and making it part of their pass-fail requirement to actually start learning to be a doctor – is a bit mad from a non-US point of view, and I can see why would-be US doctors find it incredibly frustrating; much as most civilians would be annoyed if told to run two miles in sixteen minutes and do fifty pushups in two minutes every year in order to keep their jobs.

Again coming late to the party and finding all the good booze bamboozled and all the fine wine whined, I couldn’t leave the thread without somebody (me, me) noting that the relevant comparison for competitive med school admissions is not between the student struggling to a B in Dr. Evul’s philosophy class and the student cruising to an A in Dr. Puffy’s cultural studies class. It’s between the student who earns a B in the philosophy class and the student who earns an A in the philosophy class. They want the ones who eat orgo for brunch and pick their teeth with philosophy, because later it’s gonna get a shitload harder than that.

The kid with the gut classes on the transcript is already red-flagged on ordinary admissions office gpa-weighting scales. For a good med school a 4.0 or better just makes the first cut, then they get serious.

kb: “but the point of grades is to discriminate.” Exactly.

By the way, my podunk little school with the cludgy db-based campus computer system does indeed collect and distribute grading-distribution data by individual, department and school, and it is a subject of regular norming conversations.

If you think that learning a bit of philosophy (or a foreign language, or whatever) is a good thing for a doctor, make that part of the course.

Well, that’s exactly what it is. Usually a pre-med major is “major in X, and take enough science courses to do well on the MCAT if X isn’t a science.” Not that I don’t think there’s good reasons to adopt the European model, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise to an American student getting a BA that she has to do the work even if she also wants to go to med school.

Yes, JPool (“Also, I’m remembering reading Bloix making this argument before (here?)”): see thread “Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on[.]” from Feb. 19.

jvhillegas, thanks.
Interestingly it was Spike who offered the “Get over yourself, grademonkey” argument in that thread, and Bloix who came in later with an interesting point about student expectations. Hmm.